- ARCHIVE / Imagine Nation
- Vote for Dennis Kucinich … in the media polls (at least)
We’re back to blogging after a holiday break, spurred from inaction by more news that Dennis Kucinich was excluded from primary debates. Here’s my contribution to Politics 2.0: Vote for Dennis Kucinich in any poll you come across. The vote costs you nothing, and unfortunately, polls have become more meaningful than the ballot.
- In Search of … Future Tech
The Jetsons promised we would all be using flying cars by now. While that business tech is on the verge of finally being realized, it isn’t overshadowing a lot of other cool ideas that are on the drawing boards. When it comes to scouting trends in future technology, there is a nice new resource available to help the search: Future Scanner.
- Designing What’s Next
A central theme of disconnection between theory and practice was meant as a call to HCI theorists to improve both the communication and the pragmatics of technique. That disconnection applies in the other direction, too, in how we perceive and intervene in the evolution of the World Wide Web. Perhaps we need a little more theory in our practice of predicting the future.
- Stupid is as stupid does
There is an effort underfoot to filter stupidity from Internet discussions. Seriously. Although it sounds like it could be a headline from The Onion, Gabriel Ortiz and Paul Starr are actively collecting a corpus of data in the hope that some Bayesian analysis will generate a reliable tool to intervene before a commenter makes their stupidity public. StupidFilter got BoingBoinged last month without much reaction but popped back up in the blogosphere this week with some ferocity.
- My brother from another mother
When things get a bit too stressful, I like to listen to Bob Schneider. Not just New Bob with his fancy web site and eclectic philosophical songs. I also love the raunchier parental-advisory party-band songs from his (continuing) stints with Ugly Americans and The Scabs. I’ve come to think of him as the cool big brother I never had. I just wish he would visit more.
- Tear It Down
Tearitdown.org aims to close down Guantanamo Bay by encouraging electronic signatories of a petition to claim one of 500,000 pixels in a photograph. I found out about the project from a tweet by Mark Dilley, a wiki guru associated with the wiki search engine AboutUs. When I visited Tearitdown, there were 82,776 pixels claimed (17%).
- Designing in Ten Dimensions
A book by Rob Bryanton, Imagining the Tenth Dimension: A new way of thinking about time, space, and string theory, provides an explanation of how the ten dimensions might be perceived. Like Charles Eames’ Powers of Ten—which illustrates relative size by imagining a voyage from a view of the universe and down to the vibrating building blocks of matter—the insight that arises out of this thought experiment is in the patterns that form when moving from one state to the next. While we aren’t necessarily aiming to satisfy users in alternative universes, there may be some benefit in approaching design in a way that anticipates future change and acknowledges constraints in perception.
TWITTERSCHMITTER
/ WHAT WE ARE DOING
Amy:
watching kmakice's video of the fireworks last night
Kevin:
Heaven is waking up with a happy family, clean house, working computer, and Edwardo's pizza.
Heard the Word of Blog?
VISUALS / IMAGES